This new web site describes itself as the largest collection of Darwin's writings ever assembled, containing his “complete publications, many handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published”. It was launched on 19 October 2006 and at the time of this review had already received more than 14 million hits.
The site currently contains “more than 50,000 pages of searchable text and 45,000 images of both publications and transcribed manuscripts” and is regularly updated. The aim is for the web site to be complete by 2009, the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and also the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. It is clearly a very comprehensive collection of work. The majority of the material has come from the Darwin Archive, housed at Cambridge University. The project is designed and directed by Dr John van Wyhe, a historian of science based at Christ's College Cambridge. His impressive credentials are listed on the web site including many publications on Darwin. The site is also overseen by an editorial advisory panel made up of academics from several prestigious universities and organizations. All content on the web site is freely available, and the director of the project has emphasised that the “idea is to make these important works as accessible as possible” (Leroux, 2006).
One valuable feature is the ability to view images of the original document (preserving layout) alongside fully formatted text. Many important materials appear online for the first time and some have never been published before, e.g. one of Darwin's Beagle field notebooks. Illustrations from Darwin's work are available as image files (marked by an image of a finch). Selected works are available in other languages and as audio files (mp3) for download, enabling Darwin's writing to be available to a wider audience. According to Naqvi (2006) the site is “aimed at serious scholars but can be used by anyone with a passing interest in Darwin”. From the language and style used I would agree that it is aimed at academics, however the site does provide a link to a basic gateway on the homepage to assist non‐academics. There is a warning that some files are large and may take some time to load on slower Internet connections. I had no problems viewing on a broadband connection. Full‐text resources are available as images and/or text rather than as PDFs, which speeds it up. One point to note is that the web site is unavailable while being updated.
Visually the site is quite attractive, the text is easy to read and the colour scheme works well. One interesting feature is that the title of the web site has been overlaid with the signature of Charles Darwin. Some humour is added by a photograph of Darwin, edited to include a laptop! Some stylistic conventions used in text have been carried over to the web which is perhaps not appropriate, e.g. indented text at the beginning of a new paragraph is hard to read online. The homepage is text‐heavy with links embedded in paragraphs. It has been shown, e.g. by Nielsen (1997), that this makes it difficult for users to scan for relevant links.
A navigation bar is provided at the top of the homepage with four options: Publications, Manuscripts, Biography and Acknowledgements. The Publications and Manuscripts options both lead to the same page which is confusing. A clearer navigation system would be of great benefit to this web site and make it much easier to use (e.g. I would suggest simplifying the homepage for all users rather than directing non‐academics to a separate area of the site). There is a search box on the site, but it is lacking a button labelled Go or Search which would be helpful. As well as using this box, there are three other ways to search for content: Advanced Search, Freeman Bibliographical Catalogue Search and Darwin Manuscript Catalogue Search. I found it very difficult to know which system to choose and how to use it. The help provided is very basic.
The web site links to two other notable web sites containing work by Darwin; The Darwin Correspondence Online Database (http://darwin.lib.cam.ac.uk/) and The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution (http://darwinlibrary.amnh.org/). At present neither of these web sites have such a wide coverage. The Darwin Correspondence Online Database is a complementary site hosted by Cambridge University, solely concerned with letters to and from Darwin. The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution is run by the American Museum of Natural History and there does appear to be some overlap as it is also planning to make available all of Darwin's books, articles and notebooks.
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online is an extremely valuable resource which already contains thousands of useful documents and by 2009 will have a great deal more. It will be of significant value to anybody with an interest in Darwin and his work. Unfortunately the current interface makes it difficult to navigate around the huge amount of information present on the site. Improving the interface would greatly increase the usability of this site and maximise its potential. It seems appropriate to finish with a comment from Darwin's great, great grandson, Randal Keynes, who stated that “the project fulfilled the Darwin family's long‐standing aim to have all of the scientist's work available for everyone” (Sample, 2006).
